Digital dailies workflow tools developer Colorfront says broadcasters and content producers in the UK, Europe, Japan, Brazil and the US are working with Colorfront Cloud Services as they adopt large-sensor cameras for Ultra HD production.
Colorfront Cloud Services, announced last autumn, enables powerful and streamlined distributed post production, and have been developed by Colorfront in collaboration with leading Hollywood studios and post production facilities.
It combines core elements of Colorfront’s Transkoder engine technology, which is optimised for use on flexible, high-performance, cloud-based computing options.
Landmark innovations include a demonstration of faster than realtime remote upload and processing of ProRes 4444 ARRI Alexa television footage. In December, the company demonstrated realtime, digital cinema quality, 4K JPEG2000 playback directly from Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) public cloud storage to a 4K DCI cinema projector.
Most recently, Colorfront Cloud Services rendered several hours of original 4K RAW camera footage to a range of broadcast deliverable formats, via Amazon Web Services’ GPU-enabled servers running Transkoder engine.
The Hungarian developer will reprise all of these advances, plus new cloud-based EDL conforming and automatic visual effects pull capabilities at NAB next month.
“Colorfront Cloud Services is advancing rapidly, and the results are astonishing,” said Bill Feightner CTO [pictured]. “We have uploaded 4K material to secure cloud servers in Ireland and achieved realtime playback in Budapest. The same speeds and capabilities are also available across the US, enabling fast access to production media securely from multiple locations. This is great news for motion picture producers, and broadcasters are also now evaluating how Colorfront Cloud Services can be optimised for deliverables from the latest large sensor digital cinematography cameras manufactured by ARRI, Sony, Red and Canon.”
Encryption provides security of all production media. Users can securely upload original camera footage, and associated metadata, to a choice of cloud servers, and perform and automate a range of key tasks. Initial services offered include dailies transcoding, deliverables rendering, EDL auto-conforming and VFX pulls.
The 2014 Oscar-nominated movies Nebraska, Captain Phillips, Gravity, Prisoners, Rush and The Wolf of Wall Street have all used Colorfront systems, along with TV series Dracula, True Blood, Strike Back and Mad Men.
By Adrian Pennington
www.colorfront.com
